President Obama's sequestration strategy: Shame

President Barack Obama’s sequester strategy is all about one word: shame.

With the parties at an impasse on stopping across-the-board budget cuts set to hit March 1, the White House is prepping another multimedia, cross-country drive to stoke public outrage against congressional Republicans.

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Certain that the political winds are in their favor, they’re forgoing serious negotiations for a high-risk public offensive, banking almost entirely on the president’s ability to persuade. They believe that the GOP will be scared of taking the blame from an angry public — and the White House says this is just the kind of thing that gave them the victory they claimed in the fiscal cliff fight and the most recent standoff over the debt limit.

The aim is to force Republicans to submit to new revenue as part of a deal to avert the $1.2 trillion in potential cuts — and the only way to get there, senior administration officials said, is by making the GOP position indefensible.

Obama will hold events at the White House with constituencies facing the brunt of the cuts, and travel to places where the deepest cuts loom. His aides hinted Tuesday at releasing data in the next few days that break down the damage state by state.

“That’s the choice,” Obama said Tuesday while surrounded by first responders, a constituency that neither party wants to be seen as hurting. “Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their job because you want to protect some special interest tax loophole? Are you willing to have teachers laid off, or kids not have access to Head Start, or deeper cuts in student loan programs just because you want to protect a special tax interest loophole that the vast majority of Americans don’t benefit from? That’s the choice. That’s the question.”

Senior administration officials projected confidence Tuesday during a background briefing with reporters. One official said Republicans are in a worse position than during the fiscal cliff fight, arguing that the only thing more popular than raising tax rates on the wealthy is closing loopholes that benefit them.

But if Republicans hold to their cuts-only approach — as they insist they will — and the sequester kicks in, Obama could face a fiscal crisis that threatens to tank the economy and sideline his top legislative priorities such as immigration reform and gun control.

The early signs aren’t encouraging for the president.

In the face of the planned escalation in pressure from the White House, House Republicans feel no compulsion to do anything — at all.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) think they’ve done their job by passing a bill last Congress to replace the sequester cuts, and they’re content with blaming the president, since Bob Woodward reported that the White House staff devised the idea of sequester before House and Senate leadership pushed it through the Capitol.

“The president is going to try and pretend that his enemy on this is us,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. “His enemy is reality. The president created the sequester and insisted on it, House Republicans have acted twice to replace it. If there’s going to be a solution here, he’s going to have to work with his own political party in the Senate.”